September 2011

IcedTea7 2.0 has now branched for release. I plan to do the release on Monday evening here in the UK, pending major issues.

Features new since 1.14

PR717: All non-bootstrap non-conditional patches in IcedTea7 should be in the forest or dropped. The only patches now in IcedTea7 are either conditional or necessary to bootstrap. The other patches have been either moved to the forest or removed because they were no longer required.

Convert to optional system library usage via USE_SYSTEM_ZLIB/JPEG/PNG/GIF. The old libraries.patch is now upstream in the form of USE_SYSTEM_ZLIB/JPEG/PNG/GIF. It also has also been joined by some friends: USE_SYSTEM_GTK/CUPS/FONTCONFIG/GIO which relate to libraries formally used by dlopen/dlsym calls, but which can now optionally be linked at runtime to reduce the risk of issues. More on this in an upcoming blog.

PR790: Re-include JAXP and JAXWS in the source tree. Previously, the JAXP and JAXWS repository tarballs were fairly useless as all they contained was build machinery, with the actual code being in another tarball. Not only did this increase the amount of build machinery and downloading required, it also made it harder to patch the sources. The sources have now been restored to the OpenJDK tree (a facility provided by the upstream build code) and the drop machinery in IcedTea7 removed.

Allow the compiler used to be overridden by setting BUILD_GCC/BUILD_CPP. This is a more general version of the gcc-suffix patch. BUILD_GCC and BUILD_CPP can be set to any arbitrary C/C++ compiler and IcedTea7 defaults to using $(CC) and $(CXX).